|These migrations not understood in later times.| Various reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common one is that the king’s son had been banished for murder. This would explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at all why he should become king of another. We may suspect that such reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers who, accustomed to the rule that a son should succeed to his father’s property and kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings’ sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom.
|Traces of similar migrations in Scandinavian tradition.| In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs. For we read of daughters’ husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in particular, during the five generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden, are reported in the Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norwegian Kings to have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local kings.[[907]]
|A reminiscence of the transmission of the kingship through women is preserved in popular tales.| Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another family, and often of another country, who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife’s people. A common type of popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange land, wins the hand of the king’s daughter and with her the half or the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real custom.[[908]]
|Where such customs prevail, the kingship is an appanage of marriage with a princess.| Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland, and her statement is all the more significant because, as we shall see presently, it reflects the actual practice of the Pictish kings. “Indeed she was a queen,” says Hermutrude, “and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together.”[[909]] Wherever a custom of this sort is observed, a man may clearly acquire the kingdom just as well by marrying the widow as the daughter of his predecessor. This is what Aegisthus did at Mycenae, and what Hamlet’s uncle Feng and Hamlet’s successor Wiglet did in Denmark; all three slew their predecessors, married their widows, and then sat peacefully on the throne.[[910]] The tame submission of the people to their rule would be intelligible, if they regarded the assassins, in spite of their crime, as the lawful occupants of the throne by reason of their marriage with the widowed queens. Similarly, Gyges murdered Candaules, King of Lydia, |The Lydian kingship apparently transmitted through women.| married his queen, and reigned over the country.[[911]] Nor was this the only instance of such a succession in the history of Lydia. The wife of King Cadys conspired against his life with her paramour Spermus, and though her husband recovered from the dose of poison which she administered to him, he died soon afterwards, and the adulterer married his leman and succeeded to the throne.[[912]] These cases excite a suspicion that in the royal house of Lydia descent was traced in the female line, and the suspicion is strengthened by the legendary character of Omphale, the ancestress of the dynasty. For she is represented as a masculine but dissolute queen of the Semiramis type, who wore male attire and put all her favoured lovers to death, while on the other hand her consort Hercules was her purchased slave, was treated with indignity, and went about dressed as a woman.[[913]] This plainly implies that the queen was a far more powerful and important personage than the king, as would naturally happen wherever it is the queen who confers royalty on her consort at marriage instead of receiving it from him. The story that she prostituted the daughters of the Lydians to their male slaves[[914]] is of a piece with the tradition that she herself married her slave Hercules. It may mean little more than that the Lydians were indifferent to paternity, and that the children of freewomen by slaves ranked as free. Such an indifference to fatherhood, coupled with the ancient accounts of the loose morals of the Lydian girls, who were accustomed to earn a dowry by prostitution,[[915]] is a mark of the system of female kinship. Hence we may conjecture that Herodotus was wrong in saying that from Hercules to Candaules the crown of Lydia had descended for twenty-two generations from father to son.[[916]] The old mode of transmitting the crown of Lydia through women probably did not end with Candaules. At least we are told that his murderer and successor Gyges, like Hercules, the mythical founder of the dynasty, gave himself and his kingdom into the hands of the woman he loved, and that when she died he collected all the slaves from the country round about and raised in her memory a mound so lofty that it could be seen from every part of the Lydian plain, and for centuries after was known as the Harlot’s Tomb.[[917]]
|Marriage of Canute with the widow of his predecessor.| When Canute the Dane had been acknowledged King of England, he married Emma, the widow of his predecessor Ethelred, whose throne he had overturned and whose children he had driven into exile. The marriage has not unnaturally puzzled the historians, for Emma was much older than her second husband, she was then living in Normandy, and it is very doubtful whether Canute had ever seen her before she became his bride. All, however, becomes plain if, as the cases of Feng and Wiglet seem to shew, it was an old Danish custom that marriage with a king’s widow carried the kingdom with it as a matter of right. In that case the young but prudent Canute married the mature widow merely out of policy in order to clinch, according to Danish notions, by a legal measure his claim to that crown which he had already won for himself by the sword.[[918]] Among the Saxons and their near kinsmen the Varini it appears to have been a regular custom for the new king to marry his stepmother. Thus Hermegisclus, King of the Varini, on his deathbed enjoined his son Radigis to wed his stepmother in accordance with their ancestral practice, and his injunction was obeyed.[[919]] Edbald, King of Kent, married his stepmother after the death of his father Ethelbert;[[920]] and as late as the ninth century Ethelbald, King of the West Saxons, wedded Judith, the widow of his father Ethelwulf.[[921]] Such marriages are intelligible if we suppose that old Saxon as well as old Danish law gave the kingdom to him who married the late king’s widow.
|Traces of the system of female kinship among the Aryans.| To the view that the right to the Latin kingship was derived from women and not from men, it may be objected that the system of female kinship or mother-kin is unknown among the Aryans,[[922]] and that even if faint traces of it may be met with elsewhere, the last place in the world where we should look for it would be Rome, the stronghold of the patriarchal family. To meet this objection it is necessary to point to some facts which appear to be undoubted survivals among Aryan peoples of a custom of tracing descent through the mother only.
|Female kinship among the Athenians, the Epizephyrian Locrians, the Cantabrians, and the Germans.| In Attica tradition ran that of old the women were the common property of the men, who coupled with them like beasts, so that while every one knew his mother, nobody knew who his father was. This system of sexual communism was abolished by Cecrops, the first King of Athens, who introduced individual marriage in its place.[[923]] Little weight could be attached to this tradition, if it were not supported to a certain extent by the Attic usage which always allowed a man to marry his half-sister by the same father but not his half-sister by the same mother.[[924]] Such a rule seems clearly to be a relic of a time when kinship was counted only through women. Again, the Epizephyrian Locrians in Italy traced all ancestral distinction in the female, not the male line. Among them the nobles were the members of the hundred houses from whom were chosen by lot the maidens to be sent to Troy.[[925]] For in order, it is said, to expiate the sacrilege committed by the Locrian Ajax when he violated Cassandra in the sanctuary of Athena at Troy, the cities of Locris used annually to send to the Trojan goddess two maidens, whom the Trojans slew, and, burning their bodies on the wood of certain trees which bore no fruit, threw the ashes into the sea. If the maidens contrived to escape they took refuge in the sanctuary of Athena, which they thenceforth swept and washed, never quitting it except at night, and always going barefoot, shorn, and clad in a single garment. The custom is said to have been observed for a thousand years down to the fourth century before our era.[[926]] Among the Locrians, as elsewhere, the system of female kinship would seem to have gone hand in hand with dissolute morals; for there is reason to think that of old the Locrians, like the Lydians and Armenians, had been wont to prostitute their daughters before marriage, though in later times the custom fell into abeyance.[[927]] The Cantabrians of Spain seem also to have had mother-kin; for among them it was the daughters who inherited property and who portioned out their brothers in marriage.[[928]] Again, the ancient Germans deemed the tie between a man and his sister’s children as close as that between a father and his children; indeed some regarded the bond as even closer and more sacred, and therefore in exacting hostages they chose the children of a man’s sister rather than his own children, believing that this gave them a firmer hold on the family.[[929]] The superiority thus assigned to the maternal uncle over the father is an infallible mark of mother-kin, either present or past, as may be observed, for instance, in very many African tribes to this day, among whom both property and political power pass, not from father to son, but from the maternal uncle to his nephews.[[930]] Similarly, in Melanesia the close relation of the mother’s brother to his nephew is maintained even where the system of relationship has become patriarchal.[[931]] Amongst the Germans in the time of Tacitus, it is true, a man’s heirs were his own children,[[932]] but the mother’s brother could never have attained the position he held except under a system of maternal descent. Another vestige of mother-kin among a Teutonic people appears to be found in the Salic law. For it was a custom with the Salian Franks that when a widow married again, a price had to be paid to her family, and in laying down the order in which her kinsmen were entitled to receive this payment the law gave a decided preference to the female over the male line; thus the first person entitled to claim the money was the eldest son of the widow’s sister.[[933]]
|Among the Picts the kingship was transmitted through women.| It is a moot point whether the Picts of Scotland belonged to the Aryan family or not;[[934]] but among them the kingdom was certainly transmitted through women. Bede tells us that down to his own time, in the early part of the eighth century, whenever a doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose their king from the female rather than the male line.[[935]] The statement is amply confirmed by historical evidence. For we possess a list of the Pictish kings and their fathers which was drawn up in the reign of Cenaed, King of the Scots, towards the end of the tenth century; and for the period from the year 583 to the year 840 the register is authenticated by the Irish Annals of Tigernach and Ulster. Now, it is significant that in this list the fathers of the kings are never themselves kings; in other words, no king was succeeded on the throne by his son. Further, if we may judge by their names, the fathers of the Pictish kings were not Picts but foreigners—men of Irish, Cymric, or English race. The inference from these facts seems to be that among the Picts the royal family was exogamous, and that the crown descended in the female line; in other words, that the princesses married men of another clan or even of another race, and that their issue by these strangers sat on the throne, whether they succeeded in a prescribed order according to birth, or whether they were elected from among the sons of princesses, as the words of Bede might be taken to imply.[[936]]
|Female kinship among the Etruscans.| Another European, though apparently not Aryan, people among whom the system of female kinship appears to have prevailed were the Etruscans. For in Etruscan sepulchral inscriptions the name of the mother of the deceased is regularly recorded along with or even without the name of the father; and where the names of both father and mother are mentioned, greater prominence is given to the mother’s name by writing it in full, whereas the father’s name is, in accordance with Roman usage, merely indicated by an initial.[[937]] The statement of Theopompus that among the Etruscans sexual communism was a recognised practice, and that paternity was unknown,[[938]] may be only an exaggerated way of saying that they traced their descent through their mothers and not through their fathers. Yet apparently in Etruria, as elsewhere, this system of relationship was combined with a real indifference to fatherhood and with the dissolute morals which that indifference implies; for Etruscan girls were wont to earn a dowry by prostitution.[[939]] In these customs the Etruscans resembled the Lydians, and the similarity confirms the common opinion of antiquity, which modern historians have too lightly set aside, that the Etruscans were of Lydian origin.[[940]] However that may be, in considering the vestiges of mother-kin among the Latins, we shall do well to bear in mind that the same archaic mode of tracing descent appears to have prevailed among the neighbouring Etruscans, who not only exercised a powerful influence on Rome, but gave her two, if not three, of her kings.[[941]]
|Mother-kin may survive in the royal family after it has been exchanged for father-kin in all others.| It would be neither unnatural nor surprising if among the ancient Latins mother-kin survived in the royal family after it had been exchanged for father-kin in all others. For royalty, like religion, is essentially conservative; it clings to old forms and old customs which have long vanished from ordinary life. Thus in Uganda persons of royal blood still inherit their totems from their mothers, while other people inherit them from their fathers. So in Denmark and Scandinavia, as we have seen, the kingdom would appear to have been transmitted through women long after the family name and property had become hereditary in the male line among the people. Sometimes the difference in custom between kings and commoners is probably based rather on a distinction of race than on varying degrees of social progress; for a dynasty is often a family of alien origin who have imposed their rule on their subjects by force of arms, as the Normans did on the Saxons, and the Manchus on the Chinese. More rarely, perhaps, it may have happened that from motives of policy or superstition a |Sometimes a conquering race may have left a nominal kingship to members of the old royal house.| conquering tribe has left a nominal kingship to the members of the old royal house. Such a concession would be most likely to be made where the functions of the king were rather religious than civil, and where the prosperity of the country was supposed to depend on the maintenance of the established relations between the people and the gods of the land. In that case the new-comers, knowing not how to appease and conciliate these strange deities, might be glad to let the priestly kings of the conquered race perform the quaint rites and mumble the venerable spells, which had been found to answer their purpose time out of mind.[[942]] In a commonwealth like the Roman, formed by the union of different stocks, the royal family might thus belong either to the conquerors or to the conquered; in other words, either to the |This perhaps happened at Rome, where many of the kings seem to have been plebeians.| patricians or to the plebeians. But if we leave out of account Romulus and Tatius, who are more or less legendary figures, and the two Tarquins, who came of a noble Etruscan house, all the other Roman kings appear from their names to have been men of plebeian, not patrician, families.[[943]] Hence it seems probable that they belonged to the indigenous race, who may have retained mother-kin, at least in the royal succession, after they had submitted to invaders who knew father-kin only.